From the Archives

Cultural Awakenings

Issue 6 of Archai is now available!
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About the Issue:

We appear to be undergoing a collective psychological and cultural death-and-rebirth initiation on an unprecedented scale, and of unique historical significance. The Uranus-Pluto square, in orb from 2007 to 2020, is correlating with unexpected and deeply disruptive changes in many spheres, but it is also providing a rare opportunity to overcome these pervasive crises to usher our cultures into a new world view that is more just, compassionate, mindful, and sustainable than the apparent dead-end to which the habitual assumptions of late modernity, once so productive and inspired, have led us. The articles included in this issue of Archai are profoundly optimistic, showing possible ways forward in both the cultural and theoretical domains, perhaps especially correlating with an alignment of Jupiter, the planetary archetype of expansive, optimistic elevation, in a T-square with Uranus and Pluto from late 2016 through mid-2018. The contributors—including Richard Tarnas, Becca Tarnas, Kent Bye, and Michele Maynard—write about subjects ranging from Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmology, Aristotelian causation, Jean Gebser’s concretion of time hypothesis, and Ray Kurzweil’s theory of exponential technology to virtual reality, Marilyn Manson, the hip hop movement, and sustainability. This issue looks beyond our moment of crisis to new directions for the theory and practice of culture, suggesting the many ways archetypal cosmology can play a significant role in the transformation in which we are collectively engaged, providing orienting purpose, cosmic intelligibility, and a capacity for greater awareness of the qualitative dynamics informing our experience, at once liberating, heartening, and illuminating.

Virtual reality is a new immersive computing paradigm that can hack our senses and convince our brains that computer-generated experiences are real, which raises fundamental questions about our understanding of reality. VR provides a direct experience of how our reality is mediated through our perceptions, which blurs the boundary between subjective and objective reality. In this article, I will analyze major outer-planet astrological cycles since the 1960s to track the evolution of virtual reality technologies, as well as to gain insight into the transformative potential of this new communication medium.

Substantial evidence has been put forward for the astrological perspective, demonstrating the multifaceted ways in which astrology works. Yet below the surface of this evidence lies another question: why does astrology work? What does the recognition of this highly precise, yet poetically subtle, correspondence between planetary movements and events on Earth indicate about the nature of the cosmos? The evidence for planetary correlations with human affairs can, in many ways, address the alienation from the rest of the cosmos felt by the human being in late modernity. Through the recognition of such symbolic patterns, we can feel the deep interconnection that has always been present between us and our world. We are our world. The cosmic web has not been cut, although part of our human journey has been to feel as though the threads of our existence have been severed.

There are few frames of reference more illuminating of individual and collective archetypal dynamics and psychological conditions than an archetypally informed knowledge of current planetary positions. In the following pages I would like to set out an overview of the major world transits of the outer planets that I believe are most relevant for understanding our current historical moment. In particular, I want to review both the most significant longer-term planetary alignments leading up to this era and, more recent, those that have unfolded since Cosmos and Psyche was completed five years ago, in 2005. On that basis, we can deepen and extend that book’s brief anticipatory analysis of the extraordinary convergence of planetary configurations of the 2008–12 period. This article is therefore continuous with the chapter “Observations on Future Planetary Alignments,” from the final section of Cosmos and Psyche.

Astrology is a soul-making practice. The astrologer participates in this sacred act by correlating experiences in the world with the movement of the planetary bodies. With its many incarnations, the soul passes through countless charts, each time living, growing, and creating from that chart’s unique archetypal structure. Astrology is a process of remembrance of the soul’s journey and calling. The natal chart reflects the soul’s karma, story, and potential for embodiment and expression. But the way the soul lives through the chart, and thus the archetypes, is also informed by the historico-cultural context into which one is born—the collective karma of the human species at any given moment of time. Every astrologer has heard that “whatever is born or done at this particular moment of time has the quality of this moment of time.”Every chart, whether for a person, place, or event, carries the archetypal qualities associated with the position of the planets at that moment. Perhaps less often considered is the way in which a new discipline is born out of its historical moment. Every discipline, like every person, comes from a tradition steeped in a rich and complex history. All things born during our current time are coming out of the tradition of patriarchy, thousands of years old, with its considerable gifts and immense challenges. Depth psychology and archetypal astrology, like most things born in our time in the West, have evolved out of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian patrilineal traditions. History and tradition deserve our careful attention, both our reverence and our critical analysis. Each age carries forward everything that has come before it while at the same time evolving that tradition. Each age undertakes the collective soul-making of our species.

An Evolving Perspective

Delia Shargel
From Archai Issue 5, 2016

For Jung, the call to individuate arises from the deepest sources of life and is supported inwardly and outwardly by the compensatory activities of nature. It is a call, therefore, that is not to be taken lightly. Both inwardly and outwardly nature strives unceasingly to bring about the realization, in the life of the individual, of a unique pattern of meaning.

Robert Aziz, Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity

When I first began seeing clients as a psychotherapist, I found myself entranced by their stories and deeply moved by their struggles. As I listened to the themes of their lives play out and shape themselves into patterns in front of me, it was as though I could see strands of their psychic material weaving together into a Gordian knot. I could feel how when one strand was tugged, the entire knot reverberated in response, and my client would go into a well-worn, deeply problematic reaction. That reaction seemed to be fueled by a perception that did not appear to be an appropriate fit for the current situation, and often exacerbated existing relational issues, if not actually creating problems where they had not existed before. These problematic interactions often resulted in yet another life experience that validated the client’s painful beliefs about his or her place in the world, and added to the already complicated mass of related feelings, experiences and memories. I frequently found myself reflecting to my clients: “This is complicated.”

Jung, Whitehead, and the Return of Formal Causation

Grant MaxwellFrom Archai Issue 3, 2011

At first glance, C. G. Jung and Alfred North Whitehead might seem to have little in common. On the one hand, Jung spent the formative years of his early career working as a psychiatrist in a mental institution, during which time he began his eight-year association with Freud, which resulted in Jung playing a large, and often unacknowledged, role in the early promulgation of psychoanalysis. Over the half-century following his break with Freud, Jung built his own approach to depth psychology that engaged primarily with the psychological reality of fantasy images, myths, and dreams. On the other hand, Whitehead had a full career as an influential mathematician, writing the seminal book on modern mathematics, Principia Mathematica, near the beginning of the twentieth century with his student Bertrand Russell. In his sixties, Whitehead made the shift to philosophy, specifically metaphysical cosmology, though he always retained the rigorous and abstract approach characteristic of mathematics, a level of precision that philosophers have often sought to emulate. Thus, on the surface, it would seem that Jung’s engagement with psyche and Whitehead’s engagement with cosmos have virtually nothing in common. However, as this implicit reference to Richard Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche indicates, the deepest intimations of their psychology and cosmology, respectively, seem to suggest a convergence of these two thinkers’ projects. Indeed, as I have read their work over the years, I have increasingly come to see profound connections between their ideas, particularly between Jung’s concept of archetypes, Whitehead’s concept of eternal objects, and what I perceive as their mutual association with formal causation.

Disenchantment is a term employed by Max Weber to describe the world view of modern secular society in which, as he puts it, “no mysterious incalculable forces come into play”—a world view in which recourse to mysticism, supernatural powers, gods and goddesses, spirits, and magical explanations is considered both unnecessary and invalid.1 This disenchanted vision, which gained ascendancy in Western civilization after the Enlightenment and especially during the nineteenth century, was created, Weber observes, by processes of “rationalization” according to which life was to be explained in terms of observable and measurable natural forces. Scientific knowledge increasingly replaced religious belief such that the world, no longer related to a spiritual principle of any kind, was stripped of intrinsic meaning; it was no longer seen as sacred.

An Archetypal Analysis of Rafael Nadal’s Personal Transit of Uranus to Jupiter

Keiron Le Grice
From Archai Issue 2, 2010

Even in a career defined by a precocious level of achievement, for Spanish tennis star Rafael Nadal the fifteen-month period between January 2008 and April 2009 was extraordinarily successful. The likeable, courteous, and modest twenty-four-year-old from Mallorca embarked on an incredible winning streak that saw him claim the French Open title in Paris, the Wimbledon championship in London, win a gold medal for Spain at the Beijing Olympics, and reach the semi-finals of the other Grand Slam tournaments at the U.S. Open in New York and the Australian Open in Melbourne in 2008, before winning the Australian Open for the first time in early 2009. Nadal’s triumphant year was crowned as he claimed the coveted position as world number one in the men’s Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) rankings after years as number two in the shadow of the Swiss tennis legend Roger Federer.

Saturn-Neptune

Richard Tarnas
From Archai Issue 1, 2009

Through an exploration of the individual biographies, personalities, and the creative work of major figures in both popular and high culture, Richard Tarnas’s essay on the Saturn-Neptune archetypal complex gives a powerful demonstration of the multidimensional nature of the archetypes and their myriad forms of expression in the particulars of human experience. In a continuation of the method of analysis he developed in Cosmos and Psyche, Tarnas cites numerous examples from philosophy, science, politics, music, literature, and film as he explores the expression of the Saturn-Neptune complex in the lives of such diverse figures as William Blake, Oscar Wilde, David Hume, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Samuel Barber, and Joni Mitchell.

An Archetypal Analysis of Bruce Springsteen’s Song Lyrics

Keiron Le Grice
From Archai Issue 1, 2009

Focusing on the expression of the planetary archetypes in the creative work of a single artist, this article explores the searing intensity and transformative power of the archetypal Pluto, in aspect to Venus and Mars, as expressed in the song lyrics of Bruce Springsteen. In the first of a two-part analysis of Springsteen’s work, Le Grice argues here that it is possible to view Springsteen’s recording career as a romantic odyssey, a personal journey of creative transformation, in which the dominant forms of expression of this three-planet archetypal complex evolve over time.